Sacajawea (62 page)

Old Toby began twisting the pliable sticks into “bear paws,” or snowshoes. Cutworm helped by holding the sticks over the fire to make them bend more easily. These snowshoes were lightweight, constructed in a round shape to spread the weight of the wearer. Two separate rods were joined by the toepiece and raised in front at a sharp angle. The centers were of finer willow crisscrossed in a large mesh and whipped around the outside edges. On such shoes, Old Toby explained, an active man could easily travel forty miles a day on the level. All the men who wished to walk and lead their horses had snowshoes. Old Toby spent considerable time showing the trick of walking without tangling up both feet.

The day-old snow lay deep, and under the strictures of the frost, it was dry and crunchy, so that Old Toby went first, followed by Cutworm, to break the trail. In the dry snow, Old Toby’s efforts did not make a firm track, so that the stages had to be short, and by the midday meal the men were at the end of their tether. Some horse broth revived them, but their fatigue was such that Captain Lewis ordered camp made an hour before nightfall.

The next morning, they felt the same penetrating cold. The wind was gusting, sharp flurries picking up the powdered snow and swirling ice particles around them, forcing the men and horses to turn their faces away from the painful blasts. The men soon learned to keep their faces covered with a kerchief or the end of a blanket, and to rub their faces frequently with the pad of sheep’s wool Old Toby had given them to tie on the back of their mitts. Between each gust was an eerie calm, when it became possible to hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves on the snow and the soft scuffling of Scannon’s feet, and when the men’s cheeks felt suddenly hot in the momentarily still air.

Charbonneau tried to brush the ice from his beard. He’d had that beard so long now. How many years since he’d first grown it? Maybe twenty—he’d started it back in his early trapping years. He’d kept it, worn it like a badge of maturity when he was drinking at the Hudson’s Bay Post when Toronto was no more than a couple of log cabins and half a dozen skin tepees. The beard and the peeling face—he’d even been foolish enough to feel proud the first time he’d got a touch of frostbite. He rubbed his face with the oily wool. He could just make out Old Toby leading the party in the dim distance ahead, with the horses moving along in a string behind. Then the whiteness all around him thickened—rose up in a cloud—seemed to be piling in. Whirls of snow flew high over the lead horses—sometimes the horses themselves disappeared. He sighed and moved up closer to the rest of the men. He felt his legs beginning to stiffen. He had the strange feeling he was being drawn into a nightmare. “This is going to be one goddamn stinking storm,” he shouted into Drouillard’s ear.

Once again they made camp early, using the old tepee skin Charbonneau had brought from Fort Mandan, and lashing the lean-tos together. By now some of the men had frostbitten fingers, which functioned clumsily. Even taking the job of making camp in relays, their hands went numb in a few minutes; and even with the aid of the wool pads, some of their faces had frozen in the combination of deep cold and strong, gusting winds. Along most of the trail, they had been riding right into the wind, and it is impossible when snow-shoeing to keep one’s face averted from the wind all the time. Shannon’s nose and cheekbones were showing frostbite, and Pat Gass’s nose was badly frozen. Captain Clark had a patch of frostbite on one cheek, and his other cheek had a tiny patch of white in the center.

Just by being in out of the wind under the enclosed lean-to, they were a little warmer. No one bothered to take off his boots at night, and they all slept with their hands tucked down in the groin—the warmest part of the body. That night on the high scarps the men neither ate nor talked about food. No one bothered to hunt under the snow for the scarce sticks. No one went out to chop the stunted firs. The expedition was thoroughly exhausted, and the men could do nothing but roll up in their blankets.

Scannon was not happy that night, either. He was cold and shivering and weakened because he had not been fed. Captain Lewis had been forced to hit him to keep him moving. At a time like this, he could not afford to be easy on his dog; if he didn’t keep going, he would drop and freeze to death.

Scannon had walked along slowly, and every now and then had stopped and stared after the party. He had been left farther and farther behind. Sacajawea really liked that dog and had called to him, and he had come walking on, wobbling and staggering. She’d waited and patted him and talked to him, and once she had asked Lewis to put him up on a horse right beside where she was walking so she could keep her arm around him. But he was not accustomed to riding and had been frightened, so that he struggled under the blanket Lewis had tied around him to keep him on the horse. Sacajawea had patted him with her hand. She was certain that a rest would perk him up, but he kept struggling feebly and once he had fallen off. Lewis swore that he was too tired and cold and miserable himself to be kind-hearted, but he had gone back and picked him up and hit him to make him walk. After a while, instead of plodding along as usual with his hands tucked up under his arms for warmth, Lewis had put Scannon back on the horse and, along with Sacajawea, kept an arm across the side of the dog. Lewis had felt his hand freezing. His face was giving him some trouble with frostbite by this time, too.

When they stopped to camp, Sacajawea noticed that Scannon just dropped when lifted from the horse. She knew that a dog would normally dig down into the snow and curl up to protect itself from the cold. Using one of her blankets, she built a windbreak around Scannon to keep the wind off.

The party pushed on through the next day. They didn’t make many miles, and the horses were visibly weakening. The captains were worried. Sacajawea kept rubbing Pomp’s face with the soft patch of wool and crooning to him. She ate handfuls of snow, trying to keep her thin milk from drying up altogether. Dinner was some old bear’s grease Lewis had found in a pack. Scannon refused to eat even the bear’s grease. This refusal seemed to signify what really alarming shape the outfit was in. They had another cold camp that night.

The next day was a nightmare. If anything, the weather had deteriorated. They snowshoed through quite steep country now, cliffs that rose up and rolled down. There was nothing to do but keep going, indicated Old Toby, beckoning with his arms. At the noon rest the men noticed that one of the packhorses had gnawed at his groin and rear legs where he was getting frostbitten. His flesh just seemed to split and become a raw wound, and he had tried to bite at the pain or lick at the frozen places because they hurt. Captain Lewis had a couple of the men distribute the packs from this horse on several that were not heavily loaded, and then he shot him. The carcass froze after it was skinned out. Without wood for fire, the men ate the meat in raw hunks, letting it thaw in their mouths. Sacajawea urged Scannon to stay beside her. She fed him pieces of meat, little by little.

Captains Lewis and Clark, Toby, and Drouillard sat up most of the night discussing their situation. It had taken the others a long time to fall asleep in the cold. It was still blowing, and they would have more ground drift to contend with in the morning. So the four of them sat there in that cold and knew they might not last another day if something weren’t done. As they sat there, Clark’s eyes fell on a twenty-pound canister of tallow candles. Suddenly an idea came to him.

He dumped out the candles and stood the tin canister on its end. With his ax he cut two holes in the side and a larger one at the top. He then rummaged through some of the gear until he found a couple of smaller tins.

By using the small tins, the men fashioned a crude stove with a stovepipe. Then they put the old tepee skin and all the lean-tos closer together, pushed snow around the outside for warmth, made a hole between two lean-tos for the stovepipe to fit through, and closed over the gap with a piece of elk skin, so that the snow wall would not melt when they got a fire burning. Clark brought in the battered remains of his prized desk, which was quickly chopped up and set ablaze. Everyone stood there with their mitts off, coughing and choking on the soot and smoke, but enjoying the first warmth they had felt in days.

Sacajawea’s hands felt so numb that she could have put them right on top of that hot stove, and even though her hands would have been sizzling, she would not have felt the pain. To begin with, the warmth felt good, but soon she was in agony, as were most of the others. Her hands and nose, cheeks and chin had all been frozen, and now they suddenly began to thaw out. Huge frost blisters burst out on her face. Clark had a blister down one side of his nose and others across both cheekbones. Lewis had one across his chin. Charbonneau had one all across his nose and under his chin whiskers. Many of the men had swollen fingers that had turned dark red in color as the skin became stretched and shiny.

Old Toby had told them that the sudden warmth would cause trouble with the frostbite, but he could think of no option. The best way to fight frostbite, he advised, was to put the affected part in water. Clark had laughed, telling him, “There are too many affected parts.”

Then Old Toby laughed, pointing out that the biggest problem was the white men’s whiskers. “Only greenhorns wear beards outdoors, or men in desperate trouble. Beards are a nuisance in cold weather. I notice the breath freezes in a man’s beard, and he soon faces trouble.” He was looking at Charbonneau.

“Well, with no hot water, we have been unable to shave for some time,” Charbonneau answered.

“Looks like you have not seen hot water in several years,” kidded Drouillard.

The moisture frozen deeply in the beards of the men had indeed contributed to frostbitten chins and cheeks, and now the warmth of the fire made those bearded faces sting as though they were on fire. As soon as they had thawed out and dared move without suffering excruciating pain, the men looked through the gear until someone found a big kettle in which to melt snow to make soup from the horse meat.

The soup kettle bubbled and poured forth steam, and the air inside the lean-to became soggy with moisture. Everyone’s clothing became wet as the embedded ice crystals melted.

No one complained that the soup lacked vegetables or that the larger hunks of meat were not entirely cooked. Some men carefully sipped the broth, finding that chewing moved muscles that hurt their frostbitten faces. Others pulled chunks of meat from the liquid with their fingers because it was too painful to put the hot broth near their lips. Sacajawea took pieces of meat out of her tin cup with her fingers, ate them, then coaxed Pomp to sip the broth, which held more nourishment for her baby than her own milk.

Feeling full and warm, the next thing she did was to give some of the cooked meat to Scannon, doling out a little bit at a time so he could handle it. Lewis decided the expedition should stay in this camp for a day to rest the horses, to enable the men to put medication on the legs and feet of the horses and feed them some inner bark from the few stunted fir trees in the area, and to let the men get some needed rest themselves.

A day later, the horses were much improved. Then the mild time, forecast by Old Toby through Sacajawea, began. There was a shuddering undercurrent of cold, but the sun shone, and though it gave light rather than warmth, it took much of the bleakness out of the landscape. On the scarps the little firs were bent and ragged with the winds, and the many bald patches were bleached by storms.

The party plodded on; the horses marched forward, and Sacajawea walked, even in snowshoes, with her queer toed-in stride. They saw hanging glaciers, cirques, and arêtes with poised avalanches. The expedition followed a network of ridges and seemed rarely to lose elevation; they passed gullies and glens, but nevertheless they had been descending steadily. The expedition had crossed Lolo Pass and were coming down the Clearwater watershed.

One morning Sacajawea found she could hardly move. Her face was still raw from the frostbite, and her legs and back ached. She was sweating under her blankets. She looked up and saw York standing near with Pomp on his shoulder.

“You’se played out,” he said. “We let you sleep in. But not this Pomp. He’s been walking on my chest as I try to rest on my back. We all laugh at the sturdy push of his legs. Frost never touched him.”

Sacajawea smiled, but found it took some effort. She was filled with a sick lassitude, an increasing loss of will to do anything, and, worst of all, persistent diarrhea.

“Today we rest. Tomorrow we go slow,” promised York.

Tomorrow, she thought, will I be wretchedly ill, or indifferent to any feeling at all? What has suddenly happened to me? She fell asleep as if drugged.

“That woman of yours is worn out, same as the rest of us,” Captain Clark said to Charbonneau.

“She’s got the mountain sickness,” puffed Charbonneau, who had an armload of firewood. “No goddamn stamina. She could die, like a stinking squaw.”

Captain Clark’s reply was an angry shout. “By God, she’ll get well, you bloody-minded Canuck. You know if she were a man she’d be a chief. She’s made of strong stuff.”

Charbonneau squirmed himself around inside his shirt and gave a forced, awkward laugh. “Squaws are like spoiled pelt—no good except that a man has them to keep him warm. That woman right now couldn’t bring much more’n a rabbit fur would.”

“Listen, you can’t tell fur by the price it fetches. I’ve heard traders working on a drunken Osage, telling him his pelts were no good, giving him a gourd of watered rum for prime beaver that would buy a whole year’s outfit. Man, can’t you see Janey is prime squaw? She could bring about an understanding of the Indian as a human being to the whites, given half a chance. I’ve been thinking about this.”

“Capitaine, she’s more like trade goods that the Northwesters peddle. She don’t always wear so well.”

“For God’s sake, Charbonneau!” Captain Clark sounded as though his patience had about run out. “She’s an intelligent human being.”

“Zut,
a sick
femme
is nothing but a burden,” Charbonneau mumbled as he walked away.